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School…

September 6, 2007 at 9:58 pm | Posted in Government, Indie Rock, Peelander-Z, School, Student Riots | Leave a comment

I ended up not seeing Peelander-Z but instead I saw… BATTLES!!! Awesome Math Rock band, they were playing at South Street Seaport. They have some famous experimental musicians in it, guys from Helmet, Shellac, and Don Callabero. That was really my last day of summer. School has started. I’ll still be updating, but not that frequently, maybe every weekend. But here are some of my thoughts:

– The Board of Ed is a fascist organization. They restrict some of our freedoms, and made my school add an 11th period to the day for some people. Mainly one day for lab, but I got stuck with it for 3 days a week! Two days for Physical Education! I better get on the football team, or as you Yanks like to call it, soccer.

-Student militancy is awesome! Today we got the safety handbook that talks about the restriction of weapons. Fuck that, if I want to bring a 12-gauge to school, I will. 2nd ammendment right. Now I can fight the Board of Ed and their fascost minions known as the School Safety Officers.

-Morons run Palestine. Long live George Habash and the PFLP!

Analysing Number Girl

August 18, 2007 at 6:48 pm | Posted in Eastern Youth, Government, Indie Rock, Number Girl, Ultra-Nationalism, WWII | 1 Comment

I thought I would analyse Number Girl’s lyrics. I’m going to use the example of “Zazen Beat Kemonostyle”. I got into an argument with some Dir en Grey fans about who’s more anti-fascist. Dir en Grey puts things straight forward, but they’re blind to see what has been going on in japan for the past century which is just sad. Number Girl puts out their message in a smart way, not really putting out their sympathy for communism.

Neru ore Nishinari ka Sausuburonkusu de
Sleep, I, in Nishinari* or South Bronx
Hoeru ore Tekisasu ka Tosakouchi de
Howl, I, in Texas or Tosa/Kouchi*

Nishinari is a ward in Osaka prefecture that has a large community of day-laborers and homeless people. Tosa is the old name for Kouchi prefecture, and is where Japanese revolutionary Sakamoto Ryouma was born. He was a leading member of the Bakumatsu, influenced by the American brand of humanism from Revolutionary War times. He was assassinated at the age of 33 just before the Meiji Restoration took place. You can see that Mukai Shutoku is sympathetic towards the lower class and more liberal intellectuals (they don’t get much of a say in stuff).

Insyu, hakkyou no tsumi ni towareta ore wa
Being accused by drinking and insanity
Tokkoukeisatsu*ni syoppikare
I am arrested by the special higher police
Meitei no hate no kyosei wo kurikaesu
I am drunken and I talk tough over and over

The Tokkoukeisatsu were the special police force in pre-WWII militaristic Japan, around the 1930’s. This could be taken in different directions. Does Mukai not like the Japanese police? Or is he anti-militarist? Or could the Tokkoukeisatsu be a meaning for the uyoku who like to wear old nationalist uniforms and be the neighborhood watch?

In “Sakura No Dance”, Inazawa (drummer) counts in the beginning, “Zou, Han, Yu, Ri!!” I heard somewhere that this was a slogan used by Mao Tse-Tung. Now can Number Girl possibly be Maoist?

In “Mappiruma Girl”, Mukai writes this:

Souwa yurusanu jukyou no oshie dakedomo daredemo yatteru(x3) fuu
But Confucian ethic doesn’t allow it, though everybody seems to be doing, doing, doing it.

Possibly a stab at the old Confucian ways making way for newer things? Is it taking a stand against hypocrisy?

Also, in “Num-Ami-Dabutz”, Mukai discusses the infamous Nihon Sekigun (Japanese Red Army) and a series of essays written by Buddhist monks in the 17th century that spoke out against bushido. Bushido ended up being one of the major themes of militaristic Japan back in WWII.

So Number Girl is more anti-facist than Dir en Grey.

Also, I sayw Peelander-z and Go!Go!7188 last week, but I didn’t have a camera so no photos which means no report. But it was fun. I will cacth Peelander-Z again on August 31st and will take photos and write up a live report!

VICTORY!

July 30, 2007 at 12:15 am | Posted in Government, Ultra-Nationalism | Leave a comment

Japan’s Abe vows to stay after defeat

By HIROKO TABUCHI, Associated Press Writer

TOKYO – Prime Minister Shinzo Abe vowed Sunday to stay in office despite leading his scandal-stained ruling coalition to an unexpectedly severe and humiliating defeat in parliamentary elections.

Exit polls showed Abe’s Liberal Democratic Party losing the majority it held with its coalition partner in the upper house, a stunning reversal of fortune for a ruling party that has controlled Japan virtually uninterrupted since 1955.

The leading opposition Democratic Party of Japan made huge gains, the exit polls showed.

It would be unusual for a prime minister to step down after an upper-house defeat, but calls for Abe’s resignation from within the Liberal Democratic Party were expected to grow.

Looking grim and chastened, the prime minister called the results “severe” but dismissed questions about whether he should resign.

“I must push ahead with reforms and continue to fulfill my responsibilities as prime minister,” he said at his party’s headquarters. “The responsibility for this utter defeat rests with me.”

His ruling party maintains control of the lower chamber, which chooses the prime minister, and Abe dismissed opposition calls for an election for the lower house to test his mandate.

“The nation has spoken very clearly,” Democratic Party of Japan leader Naoto Kan told reporters. “Naturally, our sights are on the lower house and our final goal is a change in government.”

Sunday’s defeat was worse than expected for Abe. Exit polls by major television networks showed the LDP and its junior coalition partner, the New Komei Party, emerging with 102 seats — a 30-seat loss that left it far short of the 122 needed to control the house. The Democratic Party appeared set to win 112 seats, up from 83. Official results were not expected until early Monday local time.

Abe’s top lieutenant, party No. 2 Hidenao Nakagawa, said late Sunday he would step down to take responsibility for the party’s setback.

“If the results are as projected, we have suffered an utter defeat,” Nakagawa said hours after the polls closed.

Abe took office in September as Japan’s youngest-ever prime minister, promising to build a “beautiful Japan,” and won points for mending strained diplomatic ties with South Korea and China.

But his honeymoon was short-lived.

In the first in a series of scandals, Administrative Reform Minister Genichiro Sata stepped down in December over charges of misusing of political funds. In May, Abe’s agriculture minister killed himself amid allegations he also misused public money. The new agriculture minister became embroiled in another funds scandal.

The government was severely criticized again last month when Defense Minister Fumio Kyuma suggested the 1945 U.S. nuclear bombings of Japan were justified. Public outcry led to Kyuma’s speedy departure.

Perhaps the final straw for voters was Abe’s brushing off warnings by the opposition late last year that pension records had been lost. That inaction came back to haunt him in the spring, when the full scope of the records losses emerged. Some 50 million claims had been wiped out.

“I don’t like Abe or the LDP. I don’t get the feeling things have gotten better,” said Masayoshi Miyazaki, 58, a Tokyo retiree, after polls closed.

Party officials said last week they would keep Abe no matter what happens, and resigning in the face of a heavy election defeat is rare, but not unprecedented.

In 1998, then-Prime Minster Ryutaro Hashimoto was forced to step down after the Liberal Democratic Party won just 44 seats out of 121. Sousuke Uno lost his job as prime minister after winning only 36 seats in 1989. Abe himself resigned as secretary-general of the party in 2004, when the Liberal Democrats won 49 seats, two short of their goal.

Some unconventional candidates from neither of the two major parties also fared badly Sunday. Alberto Fujimori, the former Peruvian authoritarian leader; Yuko Tojo, the granddaughter of the executed wartime general who ordered the attack on Pearl Harbor; and the popular inventor Dr. Nakamats were all headed for defeat, according to projections.

Only in Japan…

July 28, 2007 at 2:54 am | Posted in Government | Leave a comment

Only in Japan can a former authoritarian president from a foreign nation but of Japanese descent get a chance to run for office while he’s under house arrest in a different country.

Kamikaze Sucked

July 24, 2007 at 10:47 pm | Posted in Government, Ultra-Nationalism, WWII | Leave a comment

That according to the pilots who survived and came home.

TOKYO, Japan (Reuters) — Ordered to sacrifice themselves for the nation by crashing their planes into U.S. warships as Japan vainly battled to stave off invasion in the final months of World War Two, some young pilots instead returned alive.

As a documentary released in Japan on Saturday shows, not all the young men trained for the suicide missions that struck terror into U.S. servicemen faced their almost certain death gladly.

“I wanted to live,” Kazuo Nakajima, one of the now elderly ‘failed cherry blossoms’ tells the filmmakers with an embarrassed laugh. “I didn’t want to die.”

Japanese-American director Risa Morimoto sought out former kamikaze after discovering her much-loved uncle had been among those prepared to carry out what were called “special attacks.”

Instead of finding the fanatics she had expected, she met a group of gentle, elderly men who confessed their mixed emotions about the past, she says on the film’s Web site.

One veteran even criticized the emperor, treated as a living god until Japan’s defeat, for failing to surrender sooner.

The film, “Wings of Defeat,” has already been shown to some surviving crewmen of the U.S.S. Drexler, a destroyer sunk by kamikaze near the end of the war.

“They said, ‘We were told we were killing madmen. We were lied to,'” producer Linda Hoaglund told a recent news conference.

She and Morimoto have arranged for two 81-year-old U.S. survivors to meet some of the former kamikaze in Japan next week.

The film struck a chord with one elderly Japanese man who said he trained in the same suicide unit as one of the pilots in the documentary.

“It was exactly like that. We thought we were fighting and giving our lives for our families and our comrades,” said Masaaki Kobayashi, 79, after watching the film with a group of his former comrades. “As soldiers, that was the only thing we could do.”

The film’s release coincides with controversy over efforts by Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and other conservatives to shed what they consider a masochistic attitude to Japan’s wartime past.

Last month, lawmakers from the southern island of Okinawa — site of a bloody 1945 battle that killed some 200,000 civilians and soldiers — blasted the government for deciding to tone down school textbook references to soldiers ordering civilians to commit suicide rather than surrender to U.S. personnel in the war.

Abe also drew criticism when he denied that the military or government had hauled Asian women away to serve as sex slaves for Japanese soldiers before and during the war, although he has said he stands by a government apology to the women who suffered.

The documentary is being shown two months after a feature film on the kamikaze penned by Tokyo’s nationalist governor Shintaro Ishihara, celebrating the young kamikaze as heroes.

Many Japanese say wartime reality should be taught to a younger generation too young to remember.

“We shouldn’t beautify it, but we shouldn’t forget it either,” said a 34-year-old system engineer who watched the film.

Vice-Admiral Takejiro Onishi conceived of the the desperate kamikaze strategy when Japan was on the verge of losing the Philippines to U.S. forces.

The first attack took place off the coast of the island of Leyte in the Philippines in 1944 and its success inspired Onishi to recruit more young men for suicide missions.

Roughly 4,000 kamikaze pilots died and 34 U.S. ships were sunk in the last few months of the war, according to the filmmakers.

“They thought they were doing it for their country, but if you think about it now, they never should have adopted that strategy,” said one 82-year-old woman, who served as a nurse during the war and cried as she watched the film.

“Everyone knew Japan was losing. They should have surrendered sooner.”